Electing a US President (in Plain English)

Common Craft strikes again. Swing thought: planners' job is to make strategic complexity as simple and succint as these guys continually do.

25 Styles of Bloggery

Rohit Bhargava strikes again with this compilation of 25 basic styles of blogging including tips on how often to use each and potential to create buzz and blog traffic by using each.

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Short History of YouTube

Live Web In Plain English

The Common Craft Show is a series of short explanatory videos by Lee and Sachi LeFever. Their goal is to fight complexity with simple tools and plain language.

Motiv8!

I needed some Motivational Movie Speeches to include in a recent creative brief...here are some decent compiles if you need 'em to charge that hill on a sluggish Monday.

Giving a brand a REAL face on social networks

Hotlists is an extension of Hot-Or-Not.com which allows the user to upload brand logos or images into a database and then browse the database to create a personal lists of brands, images, logos etc that he or she deems hot-or-not. The application was recently added to facebook which allows a social network user to integrate brands into his or her online profile. Although not very widely used yet, this widget would give a brand a tangible (or many) face to look at and profile to read and judge.

Real site can be found here http://hotlists.hotornot.com

Web 2.0:Walk2Web.com

New toy! Oooo, shiny...

walk2web allows you to visually browse web sites that are linked from your URL.

I tried it out for ElectSusie and FallonPlanningBlog

How to...figure out who's actually out there

Social Explorer is a tool that shows population distributions for the US based on census data. It's cool because the map scales down to a county-by-county level and because it offers quite a large variety of characteristics from standard marital status info to some pretty interesting categories for employment. High factoid potential: South Dakota has an unmatched population of family households headed by women.

It’s got easy-access trend analysis, too, because information dates back to 1940 by decade.

Other "How To..." from the Fallon Planning Blog-Time Life Compendium
...Track your socially contagious virals
...Make the Digg top 10
...Make a viral video

How To...Track Your Socially Contagious Virals

In recent weeks I've been trying to gather tools to TRACK AND MEASURE some of our viral videos online.

Sure Blogpulse, Technorati, and Alexa are decent enough for tracking visits to a microsite, or pulsing blog chatter but in this day and age, most of our actual video play ain't happening at the official microsites but dispersed across dozens of video hosting networks like YouTube and Veoh. And new ones crop up daily, it seems.

I have mostly done my tracking old-school by just going to EVERY SINGLE LINK ACROSS MANY VIDEO HOSTING NETWORKS (iFilm, MySpace, Veoh, Youtube, Break, etc) WHICH HOSTS OUR VIDEO AND STRAIGHT COUNTING THE NUMBERS AND ADDING THEM. Time consuming to say the least.

Just found this app, VidMeter Tracker, which allows you to enter all your video links (across 23 of the major network platforms) and it compiles the data daily and ongoing and churns out a fairly decent chart for you, too. To track a video, you simply need to enter its name and then enter a list of all the URLs where the video is hosted on the various video sites. I can testify that the numbers are accurate-ish cuz I have been doing the long-form math and theirs are coming up pretty damn close. Oh, and it's free.

These links below don't help you when you want to track something specific (like your own video plays)...but they are Hot Charts that keep tabs with the pulse of the office timewaster segment (supposing Seth's Inbox of Immaturity is too topline for your needs)
Viral Chart
Viral Video Chart
WebJunk TV

Other "How To..." from the Fallon Planning Blog-Time Life Compendium
...Make the Digg Top 10
...Make a Viral Video

How To...Make The Digg Top 10

How to...Make The Digg Top 10

Marketallica gives 10 Actionable Tips (Rules) to rocket your blog posts to the Digg Top 10 here.

I reprint the highlights below:

1. Recognize Big Stories: This rule seems to be obvious, but there is (usually) a recipe for big stories. For example, a story that contains, How-to, Tutorial, Reference or Top10 tag have more chance to get front page story. Also, a story about Digg itself, Google or Apple is always popularized by users

Tip: Prefer to submit, how-to, reference, DIY, Top10 style stories

2. Track Pulse of Internet: To submit more and more big stories, you should have known “What’s popular right now”. My major resources for finding big stories are Delicious Popular, and Reddit. I track popular stories constantly at these sites. The popular stories which already bookmarked by dozens of people have big chance to get frontpage story on Digg, too.

Tip: Track pulse of internet on delicious and reddit. And your own resources of course (techmeme, netscape, micropersuasion, techcrunch)

3. Interesting Headlines: Some words like Awesome, Great, The only, Finally and Free are usually attracting more diggs than unexciting headlines. Create excitement with your headlines.

Tip: For writing great headlines you should read this and this

4. Humanized Story Description: Diggers usually prefer to quote from the original story. If quotation is exciting there is no problem, but usually there are better options. My advise is some add some human touch to your stories.

Tip: Look up Delicious URL on how people bookmarked your story. You’ll find some inspirational quotes to write exciting description for your stories.

5. Trackback Your Submission: This is not applied by most of digg users. But it can be so powerful. If your story is taken from a blog, i recommend you to add a comment to the story. In comment you can say “I like the story and i submit it to the digg. You and readers please add your diggs to get it frontpage the story…”

Tip: Add comment to the original story to inform readers digg submission.

6. Comment First: Comments added your story are important as the number of diggs your story have. Because diggspy get the latest dugg stories and the latest comment. If your stories have more comment, your stories take more impression and the possibility to get front page increases.

Tip: Try to be the first commenter for your stories. Write comments that spark debates and further conversations. Or ask a question about the story.

7. Timing: Timing is so important. Diggtrends have a great research about timing. They conclude that the best time submiting story is 9:00 EST because many office goers start digging as soon as they step in office.

Tip: Prefer after 09:00 EST for summiting stories

8. Make Friends: Digg is not %100 rational of course. People are more likely to dugg stories submited by their friends.

Tip: Make friends. Make generous friends. If you look at Top user screen and sort them by dugg stories you see that some of diggers dugg more than 10000 story. Add them as a friend. They are more likely to add their diggs to your stories

9. Digg Your Friends News: Rules of reciprocation is true for digg community, too. If you dugg your friends’ stories they respond positively and they start to dugg your stories, too.

Tip: Trust your friends and dugg their news.

10. Finally, Enjoy: Enjoy being part of world’s best community.

Of course, his final recommend is to rate his post on Digg if you like his post.

Nice.


via Marketallica

How To...Make a Video Viral

How to...Make a Video Viral

Two "Entertainment Weekly" writers consulted experts at CollegeHumor, YouTube, Google Video, AOL Video and MySpace this summer to find out what makes a viral video sensation. The keys to viral success, according to the amateur filmmakers, include:

* Comedy: The most successful consumer-created videos are funny and spontaneous.

* Hooks: Viewers must be drawn in within the first 10 to 15 seconds of video.

* Music: Sound adds to a video's entertainment value.

* Length: Short is always better.

* Relevance: Most viral sensations target a niche audience and include nostalgic or pop culture references.

Then when you make it, chart it globally here


via womma.org